An oblong crystal found in the wreck of a 16th-century English warship is a sunstone, a near-mythical navigational aid said to have been used by Viking mariners, researchers said on Wednesday. The ...

University of Nottingham provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK. However, there are also several reports in Nordic sagas and other sources of a sólarsteinn “sunstone”. The ...

Ancient lore has suggested that the Vikings used special crystals to find their way under less-than-sunny skies. Though none of these so-called "sunstones" has ever been found at Viking archaeological ...

LONDON A rough, whitish block recovered from an Elizabethan shipwreck may be a sunstone, the fabled crystal believed by some to have helped Vikings and other medieval seafarers navigate the high seas, ...

When the Vikings left the familiar fjords of Norway for icy, uncharted territories, they were at the mercy of weather. They had no magnetic compasses, and no way to ward off stretches of heavy clouds ...

Ling Li, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, has found insights into building stronger and tougher ceramics by studying the shells of bivalve mollusks. EPFL's Laboratory ...